A Few Words about Photographs and Memories

Someone said it to me again. “You have your wonderful memories of your son to treasure!”

I wish that more people would really think about what they say to the grieving before they speak. I sometimes think that before people walk into a funeral or a “life celebration,” they should be given a card that lists “Do’s” and “Don’t’s.” Thoughts and well wishes like the one above actually do not fulfill their intention. How often the grieving will hear this, and always it is said with sincerity and good intention.

There just isn’t much thought behind it.

Here is the thought: the grieving have lost their loved one, but surely their wonderful memories of the person will help them forget their loss.

Think about it. Memories do not replace the loved one. Nothing can replace the loved one. He or she is gone, and that’s it. That’s what all of the pain is about, the loss.

What memories more often do to those who grieve, especially during the first years of loss, is come like jagged shards when triggered by other things, when least expected. They come and threaten to bring tears. They come when triggered by something we didn’t expect.

For example, I was talking with an author at the Los Angeles Festival of Books a year after we lost our son. She was talking about her new memoir of her sister’s depression. As she talked, she got into her sister’s search for an anti-depressant that would work.

In the middle of this, I was reminded of how we had tried to help my son, but the medication wasn’t working. Before we could learn this and switch to a new one that might help, he took his life.

As this author-acquaintance went on discussing the switch in medications that finally had a successful result, I was sad and thinking about the night before my son took his life.

That was my memory. And it wasn’t something to treasure. I almost started weeping there on the spot.

Memories are like this. So are photographs.

We just passed through the week that marked four years since we lost our son. Every year, when this week comes, I don’t know what to expect. Some years have been easier than others. This year, again, like previous years, the days leading up to it were harder than the actual day of his loss. But those were days of struggle for us.

One of the struggles was seeing our son’s image on social media as we saw posts from his friends trying to honor and remember him. A few posts were of videos of him with his friends, and I’d never seen these. At first, it was hard to see them, because for a moment, he was there again. And then the clip ended. I was reminded of loss and of my own failure to stop what became the inevitable.

Some pictures of Michael as a child are meaningful. I can see him at his happiest, and that is encouraging.

But there is one picture of him standing with his girlfriend on the night of the Homecoming dance they went to. I realized that I hadn’t looked at it for several years, and looking at it now made me sad. I forced myself to continue to view it and think about it. It wasn’t easy, though. It reminded me of what I was trying to forget about that last week of his life, when everything went bad for him and he wasn’t letting us know about it.

As I recall, the Jim Croce song “Photographs and Memories” is not necessarily a happy song. It expresses loss and regret, though with a little sentimentality. The song never explicitly states whether the loss is the result of a lost relationship or a death. Perhaps, like all popular music, that aspect is left unsaid or vague so that more people will identify with the sentiment in the song. “All that I have are these” is the thought, and this perhaps best captures that this “all” is not enough. The photographs and memories are not equal to the person lost.

We should step outside the sentimentality that so pervades this aspect of our lives and understand this about grief.